Time disappears in the descent. You remember some nights, some days, no numbers. You stopped counting weeks ago.
The trail widens as your legs tire and your gait staggers. Finally, you sleep and awaken to start again. You wonder if your loved one followed this same path, this one trampled by so many travelers.
As the trees thin, you hear the crashing of the ocean like the breath of an enormous beast. The morning is cold when you reach the toppled wood gate to a boatyard. Beyond it, metal shanties, warehouses, and canneries lie in waste; digested by the sea, their walls crumble into rust to be lapped up by the waves. Several wooden docks rot among algae and barnacles, sunken at odd angles and missing pieces at odd places.
Something screeches in the largest cannery and in one defeated groan, the entire thing collapses in on itself. You watch the soot settle and enter the boatyard. That is when the structure slides away from an enormous monster rising within its center. It roars among the scratching and clattering metal. You dive under a collapsed shack and peer out just in time to spot a looming dust trail fade deeper into the shipyard. Something beyond it glimmers: a rowboat.
YOU ARE READING
The Second Stage
HorrorA world unseen dies over and over. It shrieks at a pitch that you cannot hear. It rots with a stench that you will never quite know. It isn't a place meant for you and I, it is merely a bank for the dead and dying; a vault of visceral agony. I...
